The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (5 page)

Brewster-Douglass was plagued by crime and corrosion even during the time the Supremes—and a few white families, including that of future comedienne Lily Tomlin—occupied the grounds. Conditions deteriorated even further in the late ’60s, and ever since there have been around 500 arrests on the premises each year. Recent renovation attempts have been halting; in the early 2000s, the
Detroit News
ran a story headlined “Unsafe, Unsanitary Areas Rile Residents.” It began: It’s not just the sight of used condoms and needles or the smell of urine that leaves Bettie Washington breathless, it’s the 13 flights of stairs she’s forced to navigate when the elevators break down at the Brewster-Douglass housing project off Interstate 75, near Mack. . . . “They have to do something about me not needing to walk down these steps all the time,” said the 55-year-old, who depends on a wooden cane to support a bad knee. “There’s a lot of old people in here. Some of them can’t come down.”. . . [R]esidents complain about trash-filled stairwells, broken elevators and windows, fungus, clogged gutters and faulty furnaces.

It wasn’t like that in the ’50s, when an address at Brewster-Douglass could actually inspire a sliver of envy. This was a holdover from the founding mission of the projects, which were conceived as a refuge from urban rot. When ground was broken for the Brewster Homes in 1935, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt came to sink the shovel and dedicate the first federally funded black public housing development in the country.

Three years later, it opened with 703 units caved between two-storey rowhouses and one three-storey apartment building. In the early ’50s, its success bred construction of six fourteen-story towers for 1,300 families, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 9

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which were bundled into a subdivision named for the abolitionist slave and author Frederick Douglass; the resulting Brewster and Douglass Homes, now a huge piece of property, had some high-minded guidelines: Its dwellings were earmarked for “working poor,” the euphemism given to the broods of mainly black auto-plant and other workers making at least $90 a week. Brewster-Douglass was not confused with Arcadia, but it more than suited the Motor-Town analog of the Harlem Renaissance.

And it stayed something of an oasis into the ’50s, even when the wrecking ball came to the neighborhood to clear the way for the new Chrysler Freeway and other interstate arteries that erased the roguish charms of the neighborhood. Many of these had been jazz clubs—

the “black and tans,” drawing the new leisure-class blacks and music-minded whites from the northern sectors where whites, mainly Jewish and Eastern European immigrants, retreated when the mass movement of blacks from the South changed the face of Detroit seemingly over -

night. A saunter down Hastings Street or a wind down the side streets around the projects could net you a night with homegrown musicians like John Lee Hooker, Big Maceo Merriweather, Bobo Jenkins, Baby Boy Warren, Calvin Frazier, Boogie Woogie Red, Detroit Piano Fats, and dozens of others. Within the Brewster-Douglass borders, on St.

Antoine, was the Rosebud club. By the end of the ’50s it, along with all too many others, was a mere echo entombed under the asphalt on-ramp of the Freeway.

It was this Detroit, the storied Detroit of John Lee Hooker, that begat Berry Gordy’s Motown empire, and the Detroit that Gordy mined not only for talent but also for public relations gold. In the mid-

’60s, when Gordy walked the narrow line between his black roots and his crossover ambitions, the Supremes presented the perfect vessel to pump both sides. This was still a couple of years before Gordy punched his ticket to the West Coast and all he left Detroit was alone; for now, the roots thing was still in the Motown playbook. So, as the Supremes swept into the top niche of American music, their own roots—

Brewster-Douglass—became a useful metaphor. One day in 1965, a
Detroit
magazine photographer snapped them on their home turf, where they still lived with their families, at least until the homes Gordy had helped them purchase on upscale Buena Vista Avenue could close.

The pictures taken showed them off as the perfect ambassadorettes of Gordy’s copyrighted “Sound of Young America,” and though he in no way wished for anyone to expand that blurb to its natural state—the

“Sound of Young
Black
America”—the subconscious pull of the ghetto 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 10

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backdrop for the Supremes couldn’t have hurt Gordy’s coveting of hip whites as well as his base black audience. There they were, then, in
très
chic
mode—Ross in a very continental black-and-white suit with a mink collar, Wilson in a leopard-print dress and matching chapeau, Ballard in a suede skirt and jacket, all under fashionable, high-sheen wigs—merrily tripping down a sidewalk on a cold winter day. Behind them, the high-rise tenements loomed; to the left, the row houses squatted. In one photo, Ballard extends her right arm, her gloved hand holding a purse, in a high-sign to unseen neighbors. Just to the rear, a mother and her young son stare into the camera, looking bewildered.

All this was intended to strike a homey, poor-girls-make-good theme. And, looking back thirty years later, Wilson would recall: “We were heroes of the projects overnight. You were hearing, ‘Hey, Mary lives there.’ You walked by and they yelled, ‘Hey, Mary, right on! Hey, Diane, hey Flo.’ I think it was the best experience I ever had in my life.

It was probably more exciting than our first million-seller.” But it’s arguable whether that was really the vibe that day in the projects. Look closely and you’ll see that the gulf between the three haves and the have-nots is fairly striking; it is as if the smiling young women weren’t celebrating their roots as much as their impending exodus from them.

In fact, within the next year all had relocated to Buena Vista Avenue, taking their families with them. They were the lucky ones. It wasn’t the sort of luck that would have seemed anywhere near likely when they had moved into Brewster-Douglass a decade before. But decades later, with homes on both coasts and private jets fueled to fly to Europe on her whim, Ross had injected into her stage act a bit of between-song patter centering on her exodus from the place.

“Whatever happened to Diana Ross from the Brewster projects in Detroit?” she would ask in her coy kitten voice. “Whatever happened to that girl?” Then, after a pause, instead of answering, she’d merely say,

“Who?”

Mary Wilson, who was the first to get there, was the only Supreme who wasn’t a native of Detroit. Born on March 6, 1944, in Greenville, Mississippi, she spent her infancy on the move; such was the drifter lifestyle of her father, Sam Wilson, who took her and her mother with him on work-seeking jaunts to St. Louis and Chicago. Her mother, Johnnie Mae, knew that Mary deserved better and, making a choice between 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 11

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her man and her daughter, sent the latter at age 3 to Detroit to live with Johnnie Mae’s sister, I. V. Pippin, and her husband, John, who worked on the Chrysler assembly line. Johnnie Mae, meanwhile, returned to Greenville, leaving Sam to bounder on his own, though he came back periodically at first—enough so that Johnnie Mae delivered two more children, a son and another daughter.

Their older daughter, meanwhile, grew older in Detroit with the surname of Pippin, not Wilson, led to believe that her aunt I.V. was her mother, and vice versa. Then, in 1950, “Aunt” Johnnie Mae showed up for a summer visit and wound up staying. The young girl began to notice arguments and awkward silences among the three adults. A few months later, Johnnie Mae took her aside and broke the truth: She was her mother, and her real name was Mary Wilson. While Wilson had not had an ideal life with the Pippins, at times given frightful spankings and whippings, the news was devastating. “My whole world had been turned upside down,” she wrote in her 1982 autobiography. “I’d trusted these people, and they had lied to me.” Trying to make sense of it, she would wander the streets aimlessly, “crying my eyes out.” Wilson never completely accepted her birth mother, who moved in with the Pippins but created all sorts of psychodramas. She got pregnant and suffered a miscarriage; she also constantly argued with the Pippins over who was going to make the decisions in the young girl’s life, and just who “owned” her. As reconstructed by Wilson, the arguments would usually go like this:

JOHNNIE MAE: I never said you could have Mary. I just said you could keep her until I was on my feet again.

JOHN: You know we had an agreement that Mary was ours.

You promised that she was ours.

JOHNNIE MAE: No, I didn’t!

The Pippins, in fact, remained the girl’s guardian, given that Johnnie Mae wasn’t there for long stretches, especially after she took a job as a live-in maid for a white family and was home only on weekends. But over the next three years, their home on Bassett Street filled to the brim when I.V. gave birth to two children of her own and Johnnie Mae sent for
her
two other children, whom she had left in the care of her mother back in Greenville. Only then did Mary Wilson meet her siblings. She also would meet her father again—initially, during visits to Greenville where Sam Wilson had finally returned, for good, having lost his leg in 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 12

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an industrial accident in the early ’50s. In 1953, when Mary was 9, Johnnie Mae moved her kids from the Pippins’ home and into a series of tiny apartment flats. For a time, she couldn’t find work and lived on welfare. By 1956, though, she could prove that she had sufficient earnings to be approved for an apartment in one of the high-rise towers at Brewster-Douglass. Mary remembered the flight to the projects as a step up, akin to “moving into a Park Avenue skyscraper.” Brewster-Douglass was a microcosm of big-city life in the mid-’50s.

The first real effects of the baby boom were reverberating through the projects, and kids swarmed like locusts over every square inch. Not incidentally, it was also the thick of the nascent era of rock and roll, fueled by the angst and restlessness of their generation. In a black environment like this one, the rhythms of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and the doo-wop groups provided the soundtrack of everyday life. In the projects, it went wherever the kids went, on the roofs, in the stairwells, in the gymnasium of the Brewster recreation center where a generation before Joe Louis had learned to box. The dynamic of three- or four-part harmony was such that it was unthinkable to sing alone. You had to be in a group, or risk being ragged as a prima donna.

Like the two other not-yet Supremes, whom she barely knew as neighbors, Mary Wilson felt somewhat left out of a music milieu generally dominated by the guys. She, moreover, was just as smitten with white pop as with R&B, though it was impossible not to be ingrained with the sounds of the ghetto, sounds that resonated on both the black and white Detroit radio stations—many of which had progressive disc jockeys who were nobly unafraid to play hard-core “race records.” Wilson found she could sing early in life, and developed a quite-nice baritone, deep for a girl but with an overall sweetness to it. Her venue for vocalizing wasn’t the nooks and crannies of Brewster-Douglass but the more formal school glee clubs. At Algers Elementary School, where she was sent in an early busing experiment, she was befriended by the daughter of one of Detroit’s most precious musical commodities, the Reverend C. L. Franklin, a preacher known widely for his overheated sermons at the New Bethel Baptist Church that invariably ended in even more overheated singing from Franklin, the audience, and the choir that included his daughter Carolyn Franklin and her sisters Erma and Aretha. Wilson sometimes observed these fire-and-brimstone 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 13

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paroxysms up close, when the Pippins could find a place in the crowded pews at New Bethel. There, she would ingest the intoxicating power of performing, later recalling how nurses “in starched white uniforms” would fan and comfort hysterical worshipers who got “too happy” and nearly fainted.

Carolyn would invite Mary Wilson into her own gospel-style singing group, but only until one of the group members insulted Wilson’s voice, incurring her wrath. Reviews like that led Wilson to doubt her talent. She continued singing in the glee club when she went to junior high school. But when a talent show arose she took the safe approach of lip-synching, donning a borrowed leather jacket and mouthing “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” as the Frankie Lymon record was played through the PA system. What the hell, it was still live performing, and it got a rise from the audience. But as quickly as it took for the next girl to go on, she was brought down to earth.

That next girl was Wilson’s vaguely recognizable Brewster neighbor, Florence Ballard, who made it abundantly clear she didn’t need any stinkin’ lip-synch, not with the thunder she could unleash from her vocal chords. Wilson would remark about how pretty Ballard seemed that night, “with her fair skin, auburn hair, long legs, and curvaceous figure,” though in fact Ballard was not nearly as winsome a girl as Wilson, with her full lips and killer smile—not to mention that Wilson was shapely
and
thin.

“Blondie,” as Ballard was called (with a hint of racial snark because of her caramel complexion), was a pistol. Not pretty in the classic sense—her nose a tad too bulbous, her eyes too squinty—she was nonetheless striking. At times, as when her lips were pouting, she could be unbelievably sexy; at other times, if she had put on a few pounds, she’d appear plain and frumpy. Taller than Wilson by several inches and big-boned by any measure, she was kittenish in the way she walked and would curl her legs under herself when sitting on the grass. But she was no girly-girl, to be sure. She was mouthy, even swaggering, yet engaging rather than off-putting; she seemed to like to argue, but was so funny with her comeback lines that the tiffs usually ended with everyone laughing. And when she was on a stage singing, she was completely at ease.